This May, CBSE’s Class 12 board results arrived like a bad smell in an already scorching summer – hard to ignore, unwelcome, and somehow spreading everywhere. 

For lakhs of students and parents, what should have been the usual annual anxiety around board exams quickly turned into missing answer sheets, blurred scans, inexplicable marks, collapsing portals, and a growing sense that the institutions running some of the country’s most consequential examinations no longer fully understand the systems they are rolling out.

The distant minister

Dharmendra Pradhan has been the Union Education Minister since July 2021. The 2021 NEET controversy, the 2024 NEET-UG scandal, the 2026 NEET-UG paper cancellation, the OSM disaster, the three-language reversal – every single one of these falls squarely within his tenure. Even before that, there was the 2018 CBSE paper leak affecting nearly 1.6 million students, followed by promises that the system would be made “foolproof”. Same party and leadership in power, the same Prime Minister. 

The familiar assurances that things were now under control have by now become as much a part of the exam season as the exams themselves.

This is usually how accountability works in this arrangement: CBSE issues clarifications, the Controller of Examinations signs apology notices, agencies absorb the immediate outrage, and the minister mostly enters the picture later, through unnamed sources or PIB releases, once the situation has already been bureaucratically padded from every side.

When the OSM crisis broke, Pradhan’s visible response came in a PIB release dated May 24, eleven days after the results were declared, announcing that professors from IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur would assist CBSE in fixing the re-evaluation portal. The release noted that student interests “remain paramount”. The day before that, a source informed PTI that the minister had sought a report from CBSE.

The opposition has been demanding his resignation for a while now, but it goes nowhere because Pradhan’s political value to the BJP has very little to do with education administration. 

Over the years, Pradhan has come to resemble less a conventional cabinet minister and more what the BJP seems to value most – a dependable election operator. 

From Uttarakhand in 2017 to Uttar Pradesh in 2022, Haryana in 2024 and Bihar in 2025, the coverage around him revolves less around policy or governance and more around coalition management, negotiations and electoral arithmetic. He is rarely described as an education reformer. More often, he appears as a strategist, mediator, or troubleshooter.

Maybe that explains why repeated demands for accountability never go far. In the current arrangement, winning elections is the real indicator. Everything that follows, whether it’s governance, administration, or institutions actually functioning, feels secondary. In Indian politics, usefulness tends to outlive accountability by a very wide margin. In that arrangement, the education ministry often feels more like an attachment than a responsibility.

To understand what that actually costs, let’s begin with Vedant Shrivastava, a Class 12 student from Delhi. 

The wrong answer sheet

Vedant’s case didn’t make the news because it was extraordinary. It made the news because the system that was supposed to catch it failed to do so.

CBSE declared Class 12 board results on May 13. But Vedant’s Physics score made no sense to him. It was far below what he expected and nowhere close to how he believed the exam had gone. So he did what the system told him to do and applied for a scanned copy of his evaluated answer sheet through CBSE’s re-evaluation process, the mechanism the board repeatedly points to as proof of transparency and accountability.

When the copy arrived, it wasn’t his paper. The handwriting was different, and so were the answers. Now I know those of us who were never particularly good at studies have often wished our answers looked different after seeing the results, but that’s not what happened here. This was somebody else’s answer sheet sitting under his roll number.

He made an X account and posted about it. Doordarshan News anchor Ashok Srivastava saw the post, noticed the account listed “South Asia” as its location, and publicly asked, in Hindi, whether Pakistanis had also appeared for the CBSE exams. This is supposed to be a veteran journalist working at the state broadcaster.

That was the response a Delhi student got for pointing out that the board had uploaded the wrong answer sheet against his name. Somewhere along the line, even questioning whether your exam paper was checked properly became enough to trigger suspicions about where your loyalties lie.

CBSE eventually located his actual paper and acknowledged the mix-up, but only after the post spread widely online. The system didn’t catch it; only the noise did.

Vedant’s case is not isolated. Students this year have reported blurred scans, missing supplementary sheets, marks wildly inconsistent with their academic records, answer sheets uploaded under the wrong roll numbers, and multiple-choice questions marked correctly but awarded zero. His story simply happened to be the one that went viral.

The fix that wasn’t

This year, CBSE introduced its On-Screen Marking (OSM) system for Class 12 evaluations. Students still wrote the exams, but answer sheets were scanned, anonymised, and distributed digitally to evaluators across the country, rather than physically transporting bundles of paper between centres.

On paper, the logic appeared straightforward: faster checks, fewer manual errors, less logistical chaos, and greater transparency.

The overall pass percentage this year was 85.20 percent. Last year it was 88.39 percent. The year before that, 87.98 percent. After three straight years of incremental improvement, the drop arrived in the exact year OSM was introduced. CBSE insists the two should not be casually linked, but students in subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Accountancy immediately began reporting marks far below their expectations or prior performance.

And then the re-evaluation portal itself began to collapse under the volume of complaints.

Students paid fees and received no confirmation. Money disappeared into payment gateways while the portal crashed repeatedly. A significant number of the scanned copies that arrived were blurred, rotated incorrectly, or lacked supplementary pages. Multiple-choice questions that students insisted were answered correctly were marked as zero because, when a scan shifts even slightly, the digital overlay reading the response can land on the wrong spot.

After a point, the whole thing starts sounding absurd, except that these are board exam results, and lakhs of students expect to shape their admissions, entrance exams, and entire academic futures around them.

The portal went into maintenance on May 21. Deadline extensions followed one after another through circulars issued on May 19, 20, 22 and 24, each new extension quietly acknowledging that the previous arrangement had failed.

In the middle of this mess, CBSE still issued a statement describing the portal as “functioning smoothly”. One has to admit, the bureaucratic confidence in India is astounding, where institutions can visibly malfunction in public continuously and still release statements that read like everything is proceeding according to plan.

What makes this harder to dismiss as a one-off technical mess is that some of the warnings had already existed for months.

Back in February, a 19-year-old ethical hacker from West Bengal, Nisarga Adhikary, flagged major vulnerabilities in the OSM system and reported them to both CBSE and CERT-In. Hardcoded master passwords sitting in publicly accessible JavaScript files. OTP verification is performed on the client side rather than on the server. Internal pages have little meaningful route protection. This may read as high-tech jargon to us noobs, but these are not particularly sophisticated exploits, at least as he described them. 

CERT-In acknowledged the complaint, and CBSE said it had made changes. But Adhikary maintains the vulnerabilities have largely remained. That dispute is still unresolved.

But even if one chooses not to give weight to a young ethical hacker, teachers had separately raised concerns around the same time about whether evaluators had received adequate training for the new system.

The notification introducing OSM was issued on February 9. The evaluations began in April. That’s roughly two months and change to prepare teachers across a country this large for an entirely different mode of checking answer sheets. By CBSE’s own admission, over 68,000 answer sheets had to be rescanned due to poor image quality, and more than 13,500 were pulled aside for manual rechecking.

These are the numbers identified.

One question students have been asking online is harder to answer than others. If over 68,000 sheets were flagged and rescanned, how many partially blurred or improperly scanned sheets passed through the system without ever being caught at all?

A student named Reshmi described students as laboratory mice. It sounds dramatic until you actually look at the sequence of events properly – a nationwide rollout pushed through on a compressed timeline, teachers still adjusting to the system while evaluations were already underway, students discovering problems only after results were declared, and then circular after circular trying to contain the fallout once complaints started piling up publicly.

The slower, less glamorous solution of hiring more evaluators, reducing workload, and improving existing infrastructure before introducing a massive digital transition barely seemed part of the conversation – a policy approach decided by the ministry.

In the end, CBSE didn’t have a technology problem. It had a governance problem, and sent engineers to fix it.

The cycle of failures

On May 3, more than 22 lakh students appeared for the NEET UG 2026 exam. Nine days later, the exam was cancelled after allegations that the paper had circulated through WhatsApp groups beforehand. The CBI was brought in. But the students who had already spent years preparing, the families who had spent lakhs on coaching, rent and often relocation, were suddenly told to begin again.

But the sense of déjà vu around NEET had already set in long before this year.

In 2024, the examination system had already publicly come apart. There were sixty-seven perfect scores. Later, the Supreme Court struck down grace marks. Tales of safe houses in Bihar and question papers allegedly distributed the night before the exam. An alleged trail of money changing hands that led to arrests. But then, as it usually happens, the outrage moved on faster than the reforms did.

So when the 2026 leak surfaced, it didn't feel like a fresh collapse so much as an unfinished one that carried over into another year. The warnings have been in place for quite a while now. But the system keeps moving unfazed.

The Supreme Court itself remarked on May 25 that authorities still had not “learnt their lessons”. The court put it more charitably than the facts deserved.

By this point, it becomes difficult to keep treating these as isolated failures – things that simply happen, as the government would have you believe, despite best efforts.

And so, the vicious cycle goes on. Whenever a scandal erupts, students protest, and petitions reach the courts. Circulars get issued with new announcements, like the latest IIT one. Eventually, another batch of students enters the same system and begins discovering the same fractures all over again.

When the NEET re-examination was scheduled for June 21, Pradhan wrote to chief ministers asking them to ensure clean drinking water, shaded waiting areas, portable toilets and working fans at examination centres. He requested that students should not face inconvenience on exam day.

He is good at letters.

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